“Oh, yes: of course I did. But what did you mean when you said my voice was in its throat?”
“Well, as I lay in bed, it was so easy to imagine that it was you singing.”
“But I never sing.”
“No? But if you did, you would sing like that. Listen!”
They stopped walking, and he placed his hand upon her shoulder.
“When I think of you, that’s how my heart feels,” he said. “All people must be happy when they think of you.”
“Marania, you think too well of me,” she said craftily.
“My heart is empty because you do not love me, and my house is as empty as my heart. Think of it!—that big house with no one in it save myself and my deaf and dumb servant, Cesiphos. It is not a home: it is only a house. No house can be a home without children.”
“Yes, children,” she said softly, deceiving him. “And a woman is not really a woman until she has borne a child.”
She had read that in a book and had wondered at it; she was very glad that she had remembered it now.